Forum:2019-08-23 (Friday)
Discussion for comic for . The wiki pages don't just write themselves, join in on the fun. ---- Open this wide. Argadi (talk) 10:52, August 20, 2019 (UTC) : That's quite a mouthful. -- William Ansley (talk) 17:11, August 20, 2019 (UTC) : I... don't get it. --MadCat221 (talk) 05:34, August 21, 2019 (UTC) :: The Sneaky Gate. Argadi (talk) 09:05, August 21, 2019 (UTC) : Annoying... so much to say about this one but have to wait two whole days... Bkharvey (talk) 05:40, August 21, 2019 (UTC) Well, it's up now. And hehe I get the first substantive comment. Which is: well, that let the cat well and truly out of the bag. That was problematic, if the goal is to get Lucrezia out of Agatha, and not just set up Trelawney to get shot and Lucrezia to escape. Having Tweedle and Tarvek present probably wasn't all that bright either. Fortunately, I'm sure this will all go to generate surplus plot down the road a little bit. heteromeles :L-I-A got locked down pretty quick, including a swift disarming kick by Zeetha and now has Zeetha and Tweedle holding her down (and probably Vi nearby for a contingency denial). Also, why is it a bad idea to have Tweedle and Tarvek present? Lucrezia was never a fighter, and she has two myocorporally endowed fighters holding her down. Another bit of evidence that Lucrezia is actually the Muse of Time, or at least has some close connection, since so far that's the one other entity that shows up throughout history. Quantheory (talk) 04:51, August 23, 2019 (UTC) :The mechanical eye is on the same side throughout, and there's only a 50% probability of that happening by chance. Ditto the apparent sex. But which Lucrezia...heteromeles Wow, if you try editing while someone else is writing, you get wiped out. The problem is we still don't know who knows what about Lucrezia, and we don't know how much LIA knows about Lucrezia's history. The other problem is that it's not clear that Tarvek or Tweedle knew about time travel, and knowing it's possible opens a whole new level of competition for them. heteromeles The thing I wanted to say two days ago is that there's no good reason Albia had to make Trelawney's body huge. She herself is perfectly capable of being normal size, and if she knows that making Trelawney gigantic wrecks her body, then doing it to her isn't much of a reward for her service. ➤ : Sorry for replying to myself, but... Albia, we know, can change her appearance. So it's weird that she's big and starry, but otherwise looks just like Trelawney. I don't think this has been thought through. Bkharvey (talk) 06:04, August 24, 2019 (UTC) :: I disagree. She wants to say "I'm a powerful creature" and "I'm based on Trelawney/Trelawney isn't around right now". It seems like an appropriate choice. Argadi (talk) 10:08, August 24, 2019 (UTC) Albia seems to think that the past can be changed. Klaus was it could be changed because the only alternative was to give up, but given all the hinted connections among time travel, higher dimensions, and the Mirrors, Albia ought to have more reliable information. (It's a good thing that it seems to be the original, pre-time-travel Lucrezia who gave birth to Agatha, or else the result of our team's quest would be to make her never have existed.) ➤ :I suspect Lucrezia's timeline, when we finally know it, will look a bit like the one in Heinlein's "All You Zombies," minus the squicky parts. If the past can't be changed, then there's no free will for time travelers. Once someone starts time traveling, then they *have* to go through with it all, even if it not just turns them into a monster, but forces them to do horrific things like creating armies of zombies. I suspect that's what happened to Lucrezia, and she found out about her fate when she was pregnant with Agatha or soon thereafter. heteromeles "She is everywhere." I think it's clear that Albia means "everywhen," but does she also mean everywhere? Did Albia look all around Europa, or just in England? ➤ As for who knows what, I am less worried than @heteromeles about keeping secrets. With respect to Lucrezia, Tweedle is on our team. (Of course this sets up the possibility of a later betrayal, but we have to work with him on this.) Tarvek is definitely on our team! As it is, I'm very frustrated that Violetta hasn't had a chance yet to fill everyone in on Steelgarter. I confess that my position here is informed by a strong dislike of secrets in general; see https://books.google.com/books/about/Secrets.html?id=5qzXknGZXl8C&source=kp_book_description. ➤ :Multiple time traveling sparks competing for who gets to control what is a good recipe for messing up history. Until Albia spilled the beans, Tweedle was only referring to Lucrezia as the Other with her copies and the revenants. Now he knows she's been messing with history. Given the way he acts, will that inspire him to also figure out how to travel in time? Will Tarvek follow the same path to either beat Tweedle or to keep from being deleted from the continuum by him? heteromeles Art note: When L-in-A is really worried, as now, she looks like Agatha, not like Lucrezia. ➤ I confess I'm confused about the thread of Lu's history. The version we see popping up in the past is her own original body (albeit modified), not Agatha's or Zola's etc. And it's her original body that tells the Geisters to copy her into Agatha. But her reason for doing that is presumably that she sees her original body trapped by van Rijn. How does she see that? In what body? ➤ Albia is talking too much. She should just be zapping Lucrezia through the sixth dimension into a cage. (Maybe she could repurpose the Beast, who's getting tiresome.) Instead she's just leaving time for the ninjas and/or Bang to turn up. Bkharvey (talk) 09:10, August 23, 2019 (UTC) :Bingo. You said it much better than I did. The only reason for someone to monologue is so that they can get in trouble over the delay. heteromeles Stupid little quibble: The real Albia has pupils in her eyes. So why doesn't A-in-T? Bkharvey (talk) 09:22, August 23, 2019 (UTC) I've had a theory brewing for a while that there's some kind of barrier in history at around the time of the Other War, one which Lucrezia's time travel technology is unable to cross. This is alluded to by Lady Vrin , as the Other War was a moment that there were prophecies about, but none after. It's possible to live through that time "normally", without using time travel, but that's a one-way trip; versions of Lucrezia living after the Other War are trapped, unable to send any information back in time to before the war ended. This also explains why Lucrezia was walking into the war relatively "blind", without being able to see and avoid the moment where she was (supposedly) defeated. If that's true, then even if history can be changed in some cases, for all practical purposes the whole history leading up to the Other War is now fixed in place permanently. : Ah, then instead of "All You Zombies" we're in The End of Eternity. :-) If so, the barrier would have been set in place by people on the future side of it, to prevent early people's time-meddling from changing their reality. ➤ : I would say it has to go like this: Lucrezia, in her own body, goes into the past, far enough back to create or enslave the Geisterdamen. That involves a bunch of back-and-forth jumps, all prior to the Other War, in order to make predictions to the Geisters that come true. Then she jumps to the almost-present and gets pregnant with Agatha. Then she jumps back to the time of van Rijn and discovers (a later version of) herself trapped in his machine. This causes her to jump forward and tell the Geisters to take care of Agatha, and she invents the Holy Machine. After giving birth, she jumps back to the time of the Queens and kills most of them. Along the way, either she is deliberately enhancing her body with prostheses or there is something about time travel that changes her body against her will. She jumps forward to take charge of Agatha, only to discover that the latter has been abducted. She jumps back to consult van Rijn on how to further or prevent, respectively, the changes to her body. He is fascinated/terrified/horrified by her, and traps her in his trap. (Personally I lean toward her not wanting the changes in her body. This may also be what makes her evil--either the time jumping itself or her reaction to what it does to her body.) I think this is the minimum jumping that explains everything. It explains Lu-in-Agatha knowing about the capture by van Rijn. Bkharvey (talk) 23:54, August 23, 2019 (UTC) :: I just realized that I never really replied to this, but a couple of notes. First, thanks for mentioning The End of Eternity! I didn't make that connection myself, but it makes sense now that you mention it. And it's one of those stories that I really liked when I read it, but which I haven't thought about in years. Second, I found your version of events dubious at first, but the more I think about it (and re-read a couple pages), the more sense it makes, even though I don't think it's possible to exactly guess what happened at this point. A minor quibble is that L-I-A doesn't have to know about the version of herself trapped in the machine to explain things. She only has to know about the machine itself. Quantheory (talk) 23:47, August 25, 2019 (UTC) ::: You're welcome! About your "minor quibble," we're talking about , right? Lucrezia isn't in charge at the beginning of that episode; Agatha is. And yet just being in front of the trapped Muse is enough to empower Lucrezia to take over enough to sweep Agatha up into releasing her. This means Lucrezia-in-Agatha doesn't just know that there's a machine; she has the strong motivation to undo it. One thing that troubles me about all this is that, so far, there's been no result of freeing the Muse/Lucrezia. That totally mechanized, spooky Muse isn't the one Agatha sees at the beginning of the story. Do we think it's the Muse who conducted the Other War? But that can't be, because that's something L-in-A does know about. Also, the period between the only-semi-mechanized Muse of the beginning of the story and the Halloween-scary Muse trapped by van Rijn has to be elucidated. Bkharvey (talk) 02:01, August 26, 2019 (UTC) ::::It seems like LIA is not completely in charge in that page. Agatha looks surprised when Colette asks her perceptive question. On the panel from the day before, Agatha's speech balloons are normal (non sparky). Before, during, and after, there are none of the usual "darling" or other patterns that we have come to associate with LIA. This seems different than the usual possession. 9thGeneral (talk) 21:20, August 26, 2019 (UTC) ::: P.S. No, wait, the extreme Halloween makeover of the Muse happened while she was trapped in RvR's machine. He trapped her with one of those intermediate appearances, but then she spent hundreds of years trapped, becoming more mechanical and less human gradually. But, given that the sequence of her appearances in RvR's timeline isn't the sequence in her own timeline, either it's just luck that her last appearance to him, the one during which he traps her, is also the last for her, or else some of the earlier-for-him appearances became nonfacts as a result of the trapping. Bkharvey (talk) 11:08, August 26, 2019 (UTC) :::: So would that mean that the Mecha appearances of the Muse are all from instances that are subsequent in the Muse's timeline? 9thGeneral (talk) 21:20, August 26, 2019 (UTC) ::::: It depends how mecha you mean. Unless I'm mistaken we've never seen her looking quite as scary as when Agatha freed her from RvR's trap. But clearly the process that led to that point started with her weird eye thing while killing queens. Bkharvey (talk) 12:14, August 27, 2019 (UTC) :::::: Argh. Just lost a ton of edits. I'll try again if I can tomorrow. Short form. She has looked worse . Her progression poses a significant problem to the barrier theory. If the Lucreizia/Muse was released by Agatha from Van Rijn's lab in the current (strip) day, where/when did she go if there is a barrier? Forward in time to the original interruption that started it all (causality, fixed timeline, etc.)? 9thGeneral (talk) 03:16, August 28, 2019 (UTC) (Possible hole in this theory: there are references to Van Rijn knowing something about Agatha's future. How could he do this if time travel to/from his era was blocked off around when Agatha was born? Although his actions, specifically asking Otilia to protect other people from Agatha, would make sense if he knew that some evil person planned to use Agatha as a vessel, even if he didn't know much about Lucrezia or whether she would actually succeed.) Whether that's all true or not, I'm very curious what L-I-A knows about all this. I think that L-I-A comes from a copy of Lucrezia that hasn't experienced extensive time travel, partly because she seems very grounded in the era around the time of the Other War (often thinking about Klaus, Bill, and Barry, and still quite familiar with her old lab under Castle Heterodyne), and partly because neither she nor Zola seem to be leveraging hundreds of years of time-traveler experience in their plots. On the other hand, L-I-A the Muse of Time and the apparatus in Van Rijn's Hermitorium. And she has talked about , and that she spent years if not decades lost... somewhere/somewhen, after the Other War. And she at that she's not the true Goddess of the Geisterdamen, which I've interpreted as partly due to a sense of entitlement that comes from the belief that she really is the "Eternal Lady" in some sense, and not an imposter. (As far as I can tell, no other insult or accusation has ever infuriated her as much as someone claiming she's not the true Goddess.) And that only seems possible if a version of herself went back in time to create or take over the Geisterdamen's religion. So, long story short, I have the feeling that L-I-A does know something about a version of her being a time-traveler, even if the copy of Lucrezia in Agatha was made "before" most of that time travel happened (from Lucrezia's perspective). Quantheory (talk) 17:05, August 23, 2019 (UTC) : Alternate theory for Van Rijn- When Andronicus and Simon Voltaire have their last conversation, they reveal that Euphrosynia didn't die, but literally disappeared while snooping in Van Rijn's lab. When RVR issued instructions about "the Heterodyne Girl" to Otilia, he may have trying to prepare for Euphrosynia popping back onto the scene and causing more trouble, rather than some new holder of the metaphorical office coming along. --Geoduck42 (talk) 17:52, August 23, 2019 (UTC) :You could be right. It's also possible that LIA (or the original of which she was a copy) met the Muse of Time without realizing that it's her future self grooming her for a future role. She therefore knew what to do to free the Muse of Time, perhaps because she'd been explicitly told to expect them. While an actual block after the Other War may exist, it may also be simple time loop hell-logic: The Muse of Time was never there, therefore she never told Lucrezia, who missed that period too, and hence the block arises of itself simply because Lucrezia was never there. If the Foglios haven't plotted this part of the story yet, it's also possible that the true form of time travel doesn't exist at present, and it will be handwaved into existence if it ever matters. heteromeles I'd also add that if Agatha and Gil become time travelers, things will get all timey-wimey on them too. It's also possible that they simply find devices, use them to close the necessary loop, and bug out from their limited excursion into time travel with their (illusory) free will intact heteromeles Lots of interesting theories. The idea of a time travel barrier around the time of The Other War raises many interesting possibilities. Who put the barrier there, did it appear because of excessive activity/turbulence, or is there some causality loop that cannot be penetrated? Bang saw that a barrier is only for a period of time and in the current day, windows in time can be created.➤ If the barrier was intentionally put in place, none of the currently identified humans have both means and motive. (Opportunity is irrelevant because…time travel). We have interpreted Bang’s sightings as saying that Agatha will have access to timey-wimey equipment in the future of the viewer’s timeline. There are also the various extradimensional beings, some of whom are sentient. A possible plot solution is for Team Agatha to keep Lucrezia from doing any future damage as a way of placating the Extra Dimensionals. The EDs then put up the barrier to prevent anyone (including remnant versions of Lu) from going back before the war and changing the outcome. Problem solved and three-dimensional space will be safe for another few years .➤ : My thought about the motive question is that potentially everyone with a stake in the Other War could have a good reason to put a barrier in place. If you have an opponent who is a time traveler, and you think that you might have just "won" the war (or at least achieved the best outcome you reasonably could have), then you want to cement that outcome in place so that the time traveler can't stop you. And the barrier is a simple means of doing that. Theoretically, Lucrezia herself could even have put the barrier in place, if she believed that she was about to win and wanted to protect herself against any other time traveler. Although I don't think that the ED theory is bad either. Quantheory (talk) 23:47, August 25, 2019 (UTC) :: But most of the stakeholders in the Other War don't have time travel technology, so presumably also not time barrier technology. Only the Other, and I guess the Dreen if they're active pre-Klaus-return. Bkharvey (talk) 02:04, August 26, 2019 (UTC) ::: I was only talking about the motive question, not the means question. I mean, someone came and retrieved Agatha from the Geisterdamens' lands, and someone either defeated the Other or convinced her to stop. And the Heterodyne boys (if either of them even know) aren't around to explain what happened. So I don't think it's crazy to think that someone stole or reverse-engineered Lucrezia's time technology. Quantheory (talk) 02:53, August 26, 2019 (UTC) :::: My first thought was that it was Milvistle who brought Agatha back to earth. But of course that's wrong, or she would have grown up in Zola's family's tender care. So my money is on Barry. Does he have to have traveled in time, not just space? By mirror? Bkharvey (talk) 04:42, August 27, 2019 (UTC) ::::: Child Agatha ends up in the care of Barry, Punch, and Judy, so whoever rescued her would have been on Team Heterodyne. It stands to reason that it would be Barry. Not Klaus because he didn't know of her existence. As you point out, not Milvistle. The other possibilities would include a time-travelling Agatha or a well-meaning Extra Dimensional like Mr. Purple, both of which seem rather far-fetched. ➤ ::::: Semi-related, it seems unlikely that we will ever see Barry or Bill except in flashback for the same plot reasons that Colette stayed in Paris and Albia will stay in England. Have there ever been any hints that Bill did or did not survive the Other War or reasons as to why Barry went into hiding (beyond Lilith's reference to the old times )? 9thGeneral (talk) 11:55, August 27, 2019 (UTC) :::::: If, as has been suggested, the Foglios have a definite endpoint in mind for the comic, then I hope that all the loose ends are cleared up by then. Bill and Barry are big ones, but we need to know why it was important to go back in time to find Moloch's shipmates, for example. Albia will stay in England, but if the Mirrors are repaired, there might be a general meeting of the whole gang at the end, who knows. But if it's going to go on forever, then you're right, Bill and Barry hold our interest more while they're missing than they would once found. As to Barry in hiding, I can't think of more than two answers: Klaus and Lucrezia. (Yeah, yeah, 97th dimensional thingies, but I don't believe it.) In either case, I imagine his purpose was to protect Agatha, and after a series of hasty moves, he figured that K or L was finding him, not finding Agatha directly, and so she'd be safer with him gone. And he was correct; Agatha wouldn't have come to either K or L's attention without a really improbable sequence of events. Don't you think? Bkharvey (talk) 12:14, August 27, 2019 (UTC) ::::::: This does not have the writing of a shaggy dog story. Barry, like Albia and Colette, are too powerful to be part of the main story. Barry might appear from some trapped state at the end for closure, but Bill seems likely to be non-extant. As far as Barry hiding, it seems likely that he would suspect Lucrezia. It is now far too late for me, but I recall Klaus making some comment that he was not surprised that Barry would not trust him. It does not appear that the EDs had anything to do with the Other War. 9thGeneral (talk) 03:23, August 28, 2019 (UTC) The past has to be changeable or else Lucrezia could not have done the damage she has done. If you follow ‘''The Man Who Folded Himself''’ logic, a traveler can change history, see the result, and then go back and fix their own changes. Quantheory’s barrier idea is an attractive plot device because it sets the state of the game board around the time of Agatha’s birth and then doesn’t allow it to be changed, removing the possibility that Agatha and Albia could go stomping around the past. So what would be the causal loop that is the barrier? Agatha’s birth? Is she her own kidnapper? ➤ :Not necessarily. As various authors have pointed out (and we can add in Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife) there's no particular reason why a time traveler should have free will. If this is the case in this universe, the Lucrezia is damned to do what she does, and the apparent time travel barrier during the Other War may have arisen by accident. If altering timelines is possible, then we get into all sorts of fun, where you can have infinite alternate timelines, a timeline with lots of inertia that heals itself, or (one I wrote a bad book on once...but never mind) even sillier ideas. The presence of critters from other timelike dimensions complicates things, but it doesn't imply free will within the storyverse. LATE ADD: I should point out that "timey-wimey" comes from Dr. Who, and the quote: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff." heteromeles :: As far as time having inertia-like quantities, an excellent read is Zelazny's "Roadmarks". Time is a highway that only a few can travel. Highway exits appear and disappear from use, disuse, or changes in the past.9thGeneral (talk) 21:20, August 26, 2019 (UTC) Thank you for the good scifi reading recommendations.9thGeneral (talk) 15:58, August 25, 2019 (UTC) It should be noted that if Othar's description of his Twitter-based adventures is even remotely accurate, then, yes, a time-traveller can change history- he spent time in a Europa where the Other killed everyone, before being mentally thrust back in time to change things to the current timeline. --Geoduck42 (talk) 17:17, August 25, 2019 (UTC) A few thoughts down here: # Lucrezia's ability to inhabit multiple bodies at once really screws with our ability to come up with a definitive timeline at this point. Since Albia has seen her at multiple times in history, we could sort of use her apparent age at those points to track her original body (assuming that she hasn't cloned it or something), but any versions of her that aren't clearly recognizably human are pretty hard to track age-wise. # I find this and more generally these interesting with regards to time travel in fiction. I don't subscribe to all of those opinions, but I thought it was a reasonable way of cataloguing time travel systems. # The machine that transferred Lucrezia's mind into Agatha is still pretty mysterious. It's called the "summoning" or "beacon" engine, and Lucrezia refers to the incarnations of herself as "callings". That might all be misdirection, but it sounds like she's suggesting that a copy of her mind is just out there, somewhere, and that the summoning engine is just a mechanism to draw it in and download it into something. Quantheory (talk) 23:47, August 25, 2019 (UTC) : Re #3: That's a really interesting idea, but it seems to be only a snapshot of Lu at a particular time; Lu has to clone Agatha before killing her lest she lose the knowledge that Zola isn't really a calling, but rather a captor. Bkharvey (talk) 02:09, August 26, 2019 (UTC) : Crazy plot prediction: It turns out that our heros need Lu-in-A as an ally to help kill Zola, which is in both their interests. But after that, our heros think Lu can't kill Agatha's body because it's the only Lu left, whereas Lu-in-A knows that Lunevka is another calling, so she can kill Agatha (i.e., suicide) and someone has to jump in at the last moment to prevent that. Bkharvey (talk) 11:36, August 26, 2019 (UTC) :: Tarvek knows about Lunevka because he helped construct her, and Gil probably knows about Lunevka because she started bossing around Klaus before Klaus put an overlay of himself in Gil. (So at minimum the overlay should have known, and Gil probably found out from that.) Quantheory (talk) 02:31, August 28, 2019 (UTC)